The US-CERT cybersecurity incident notification guidelines that go into effect April 1, 2017, will affect all Federal departments and agencies, as well as state, local, tribal, and territorial government entities, among others.
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The Office of the Inspector General at the Office of Personnel Management audited the agency’s security programs and practices under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act and found a significant deficiency in OPM’s security management structure.

Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology disagreed on Wednesday on whether the Cybersecurity Responsibility and Accountability Act of 2016 acted as a partisan dig against former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is on what appears to be an irreversible losing streak when it comes to its annual cybersecurity audit. Last week, VA’s Office of the Inspector General slapped the agency with a “material weakness” designation for its information security efforts—the 16th year in a row that VA has failed the annual […]
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Federal agencies remain woefully behind on cybersecurity, according to the annual cybersecurity compliance report released Friday by the Office of Management and Budget. During the 2015 fiscal year, Federal agencies reported 77,183 cybersecurity incidents, a 10% increase over the incidents reported in 2014. Though the administration believes this increase may be attributed to improved detection […]
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Microsoft Azure was selected for a FedRAMP pilot program that will establish a high-impact baseline for cloud-computing services. This essentially allows Federal agencies to move more sensitive data onto contracted cloud-computing services, enabling the sensitive data to operate on the more technically advanced level that is already possible for low-impact data.

A representative of a Federal cloud computing industry advisory group filed a formal complaint this week with the General Services Administration’s inspector general alleging officials from FedRAMP issued veiled threats of retaliation against member companies that publicly voiced concerns about problems with the cloud security certification process.

The word “other” and other vague terms have infiltrated the naming convention of Federal spending categories and could wreak havoc on project budgets, according to one International Data Corporation official.

Data breaches at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have prompted a major cybersecurity push in Congress, and two bills propose giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) new authority and tools to protect Federal systems.